Saturday, March 28, 2009

Wishing to disestablish the Force as a god in Star Wars, I invented this historical retelling of general JedI history.

The Force has its origin in a small plant that is native to most plants in the galaxy. When this plant is eaten, it greatly accelerates and strenghtens the bodily functions of the eater, especially the nerve impulses to the muscles, enabling the eater, through special muscle-use techniques, to project electric fields into nearby objects and thus manipulate them in ways that seem telekinetic. The relevant chemicals in the plant must be eaten on a daily basis for the powers to be retained. These chemicals can be synthesized, in which case only a person previously exposed to them by eating them or having a mother who ate them while pregnant can eat them without being poisoned.

Because of the widespread habitat of this plant, amateur JedI-societies sprung up independent of each other in many places. Some worshipped the Force, and their “sacred” texts had some of the earliest JedI advice and techniques, hence the value placed by all the JedI on them; some did not worship the force. Some used the powers classified as Light, some used the powers classified as Dark. When Palpatine was planning his takeover of the Republic, he sold government offices in order to gain money for his plans. The office of state historian he sold to a Force-worshipper who falsely made this religious Force the official recorded religion of the JedI according to state records.

For thousands of years, there was no actual JedI Order. The small JedI societies had no knowledge of each other; many did not even have any knowledge that the chemicals they ate each day by tradition were the source of their powers and/or intelligence. During this time (Referred to by JedI historians as the Glorious Dark Ages of the JedI), these societies were merely amateurs. However, many of the greatest JedI intellectuals wrote during this time, and JedI achieved prominence as poets, artists, educators, and even religious leaders of many denominations. (Cerea, Ki-Adi-Mundi’s planet, was especially known for its high number of JedI who were also Catholic priests. ) During this period, light saber combat was not one of the prime functions of the JedI. The weapon was originally invented as an amusement for the JedI boys’ club in Maputo, Correlia, and became an inter-planetary toy sensation. It went out of regular children’s toy stores a few years later, but that was enough time for many jedI-empowered families to have one in their possession. Because of the durability of the toy, many became family heirlooms.

One of the less desirable consequences of eating the Force-plant .is that bad habits are formed much more easily and the brain is somewhat perverted so that anger becomes especially attractive. This means that JedI must get angry as little as possible, especially in combat, when they are the most susceptible to anger becoming irresistible forever; if they do not control anger, they run the risk of being perpetually angry. In fact, in some jedI, certain kinds of anger are so dangerously habit-forming that avoiding them is a moral obligation. Some JedI, known as Dark JedI, are immune to this effect. Plo-koon, Kyle Karhun, and Palpatine’s master were some of these.

The force does not grant longevity! The ancient Yoda was actually half-elven and immortal. According to his family history, he, Mace Windu, and Quigon (they were half-brothers: Yoda was so short because he had a hobbit-father, Mace and Qui-gon had human fathers) were descended from Middle-Earth elves who left Middle-earth after the rounding of the world (see the Silmarillion) but whose boats took a wrong turn on the Straight Road to Valinor. Yoda and his cousin Palpatine (who was also of elvish descent) were mortal enemies due to the fact that Palpatine fell for the Dark Side due to an encounter with the maddening rhythms of Aztec music. As part of Palpatine’s assaults of Yoda, Yoda caught an artificial aging disease that made him older but no closer to death.

Yoda was the one actually responsible for the organization of the JedI into an organized system. When Yoda was about 20 years old, Palpatine, who had already gained his hatred of Yoda, organized a convention of JedI from all over the galaxy. Hoping to form them into a mob and then seduce them with Aztec music, his plans were foiled when Yoda was accidentally invited to the convention. Yoda managed to keep a few of the JedI present from becoming Sith.

Knowing that the Sith would attack eventually, their anger being uncontrollable, Yoda re-made the lighsaber into a more potent weapon that only people with the electric sensitivity of JedI could handle safely. The lighsaber was forgotten and thrown away among non-jedI. Yoda also established a Christian monastic order of warrior-monks, the JedI Order, whose Temples on many planets (especially Courescuant) became renowned centers of learning. The amateur JedI societies continued to exist, and some amateurs (such as Qui-gon) rose to become professional full time JedI warriors and instructors, though not actual monks or nuns. Such amateur rise was rare, although many amateur JedI became renowned in the militaries of their own planets.

The JedI Order rose to great Intergalactic prominence when it conducted the defense of Nubia when Nubia was attacked by the sith in the battle that started the Great Sith war. The Galactic Republic, originally consisting of only three planets, was founded in this time, and the JedI Order was given an official place in the government to prevent government corruption. The order had an excellent relationship with the bishops of Courescuant.

When the Republic experienced a grand expansion of membership about 30 years before Star Wars Episode I, the religious order was disbanded and the JedI were made an official funded branch of the Republic. It never lost it Christian character, however, merely its monastic status. This federalization gave the state historian (who remained so in the days of the Empire and the New Repbulic) the leverage he needed to spread lies concerning the religion of the JedI. Many of the incidents recounted in the movies are, in fact, false and his invention. The others can be explained by the principles outlined above.

Friday, March 27, 2009

One of the things Tokien wanted people to do with his tales was to use them as a background mythology, much as Ancient Greeks and Mideval Christians used the pagan myths to get inspiration for their own works. To see an example of it,

Sunday, March 22, 2009

A. What about Star Wars would you like to know? B. On the other hand, what could I tell you that you wouldn’t know already? C. Or are you asking for an opinion about Star Wars? B-cause of B, I will A-sume that you do not mean A, so it Ceems that you mean C. Because Ancient Greek Phil. usually wants a moralization of some sort, he shall get it. Is Star Wars a good thing, and for whom and under what conditions? Before writing, I did some reading on Wikipedia. They classify Star Wars as a “space opera,” meaning that it is a melodramatic, comic-book sort of story with exaggerated technologically advanced forms of conflict. You could visit Disciples of Diotima and read the article ‘Between the Charbidys and Scylla of Emma and Godzilla’ to get my views on comic-books. You could also simply accept it on my word that comic books are an excellent way to instill basic morality or immorality into the minds of little boys and other people who are fortunately or unfortunately like them. And, in Star Wars, many of the basics of morality (and it’s very difficult to capture all of them in one story) are presented excellently. Especially calculated to indoctrinate virtues of valor, obedience, patience, patriotism, distributism, and the like, while at the same time instilling a horror of treachery, anger, hatred, over-mechanization, laziness, greed, over-centralization, and injustice, the story definitely achieves this part of the end of being a good story without directly such preaching such ideas. I don’t think I need to give examples of such moral instillations; the very genere covers some of them and the others are more or less obvious features of the somewhat simple general plot. For the observer enamored of action, the lessons will be swallowed along with the moves and the chicken in the Tatioone market. But I don’t think that is really what you want to know. Of course there is good and evil in Star Wars in a very general sense, and nobody would object to their children or themselves learning it. In swallowing one virtue from Star Wars, is there not the danger of swallowing other less good things contained in it. This is art, not life; we can pull out the tares and not damage the wheat, but if we harvest the wheat we might get tares too. And the tare said to be contained in Star Wars is the religion/ethics of relativistic pantheism. Is it really in Star Wars? (Here follows a quick summary of relativistic pantheism. RP is the belief that all things are not separate from the god. By definition, this includes the denial of individual free will and the denial of good and evil. It is generally the religious system of non-Christian religions, including Hinduism (which substitutes desirable and undesirable fatalistic consequence-punishments for good and evil), Taoism, and Buddhism (which substitutes passionlessness and passion for good and evil). Star Wars seems to moderate the ethical consequences this claim (more on this later) by positing two sides to the same pantheistic deity, dark and light, much as Zorastriansim and Manicheanism posit two equal gods, one good and one evil, without giving any real reason to follow one god and not the other. By the way, the Christian justification of being good and not evil is that evil does not exist except as a good thing deprived of a quality it ought to have, thus making pursuit of actual evil not only undesirable, but impossible.) For Star Wars to in fact be a story in which one could swallow relativistic pantheism along with virtue, worship or acknowledgement of such a deity has to be portrayed as desirable (not good, as there is no “good” in relativistic pantheistic metaphysics or ethics) and true (it could be portrayed as good but not true, as the statement “Buddhists are often good people” does, or true but not good, as Sartre portrays atheism in ’Nausea,’ but neither of these would be dangerous for the Christian.). Now, I cannot remember whether or not the Force is ever explicitly treated as a god in the films (I suspect that if it is, it is by Yoda on Dagobah). Whether it is explicit or not is irrelevant for the viewer, however. For the unaware viewer, if the Force is treated non-explicitly as a god, they will swallow it anyway. Making the treatment explicit would make the viewer aware and would render the series preachy, thus weakening both the moral and the theological messages. For the aware viewer, non-explicit treatment can still be seen as paganism (its subconscious influence on the viewer is debatable), yet give the viewer freedom to imagine around the non-explicit difficulties. The most significant argument in favor of a non-explicit treatment of the Force as a deity is in the jedi’s source of morality. Christians, as noted above, treat good and evil as existence and its deprivation, thus goodness comes from the Essence of God and evil comes from “nothing.” Whether or not Star Wars is compatible with this system of morality is at best unclear. What is clear, however, is that the main source of morality for all the characters is the light-dark dualism of the Force. G.K. Chesterton says that the denial of morality is allied with the exaltation of less-than-moral rules, such as manners and conventions. By emphasizing the Force-conventional-code (for the light and dark sides are not sufficient to determine good and evil under God, and thus have only the status of laws/conventions/etc, not objective good and evil) and ignoring the God-Morals, the jedi, whether or not they actually believe the Force is god, are undermining God’s ethics and setting up The Force in God’s ethical place. Obi-wan even goes so far as to say in Episode III, that “Only the Sith deal in absolutes,” thus lending even more credence to the idea that the jedI are pantheist-relativists (the Sith, in this system, would be seeking a thoroughly evil version of what the JedI want to be mostly good.) Another argument is the JedI’s use of eastern religious meditation techniques that, in the real world, are related to demonic possession even though those who practice them. There are other similarities to such eastern religions in Star Wars, thus making the idea seem all the more true, if not explicit. And, though all of this, the Star Wars characters posit no God in addition to the Force, thus letting and even encouraging our religious impulses in our imagination add the character of worship to the use of the Force. I think it is plain enough that Star Wars can be dangerous to the morals of the viewer, especially the uninformed viewer. There are, however, three ways to counter this.

1. Be informed. I just informed you. 2. Do an implausible re-interpretation of Star Wars so that you can understand it in a Christian way. I have done this, and I can show you that too. Later 3. Find a way in which Star Wars portrays the pantheistic system as insufficient. An example would be a connection in the movies between the false ethical/religious system and the fall of the Republic. This would make it appear that no matter how pagan the jedI were, they end up being more or less wrong, though honorable. I can try to do this, though I might have to watch the movies again.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

You know what we need, Old Fashioned Liberal? We need an article on Stars Wars! I should write it, but you're a much bigger fan than I am, and I'm just too lazy right now anyway. I could do an article on the music though, as I'm listening to Princess Leia's theme right now. :-)

Thursday, March 12, 2009

"For it does many things through vicious desire, as though in forgetfulnessof itself. For it sees some things intrinsically excellent, in that more excellent nature which is God: and whereas it ought to remain steadfast that it may enjoy them, it is turned away from Him, by wishing to appropriate those thingsto itself, and not to be like to Him by His gift , but to be what He is by its own, and it begins to move and slip gradually down into less and less, which it thinks to be more and more; for it is neither sufficient for itself, nor isanything at all sufficient for it, if it withdraw from Him who is alone sufficient: and so through want and distress it becomes too intent upon its own actions and upon the unquiet delights which it obtains through them: and thus, bythe desire of acquiring knowledge from those things that are without, the nature of which it knows and loves, and which it feels can be lost unless held fast with anxious care, it loses its security, and thinks of itself so much the less,in proportion as it feels the more secure that it cannot lose itself."

--St. Augustine

Notice the similarity to how "it" (the soul, in this passage) sins and how Melkior fell. The soul sins by wanting good things as its own rather than as God's gift. Melkior sinned by wanting to master the power of Creation, not have it as a gift from Iluvitar.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

There is a deadly malady going around Blogger. An infectious disease known as "The Dead Blog Syndrome". This disease is highly contagious. It starts as a lack of desire to write. It gradually consumes you until you are unable to write anything at all.

If you read this, you are vulnerable to The Dead Blog Syndrome". Beware!!!!

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Well it seem as though no one thinks I'm weird!!!! I'm really surprised, since I think that was a weird poll!!!! Whatever happened, it turns out that the majority of you that voted can control your dreams slighty. I'd be interested to know who it was that can control their dreams entirely!!!!

Monthly Quote

""Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where Shadows lie,
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where Shadows lie."